THE SPECTATOR’S NOTES
CHARLES MOORE
The best thing would have been for all the British papers to have published all the cartoons of Mohammed that appeared in Jyllands-Posten. As well as collectively asserting the right of freedom of speech, this action would have given readers the chance to see what is actually being discussed. The context, satirised in many of the cartoons themselves, is the very point over which all the rioting has taken place — the danger of provoking anger by drawing the Prophet. One of the pictures shows the cartoonist hunched over his drawing board, nervously shielding his picture from the eyes of menacing, bearded phantoms. Although the cartoons differ quite strongly from each other, there is a shared tone, one of student jokiness and of tail-tweaking. Even the picture of Mohammed with his turban turned into a bomb is done for comic, not threatening effect — a joke, one might guess, more at the expense of Islamist extremists who constantly invoke the Prophet in their desire to blow people up than an attack on the man himself. (Despite several reports to the contrary, none of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons was obscene or depicted the Prophet as a pig; these pictures were helpfully interpolated by angry Muslims in emails designed to make other Muslims angrier still.) Obviously those who abhor any depiction of the Prophet will abhor these, but from all the pompous denunciations by people like Jack Straw you might think that what appeared was vicious or hate-filled. It was not: if these drawings had been about any other subject whatever, including Jesus, they would have excited no remark in the West at all. So the question then becomes, ‘Must we apply completely different standards to what is said or drawn about Mohammed than to anything else?’ Surely it is important to answer, ‘No’.
John Casey was right to point out, in the Sunday Telegraph, that people have forgotten how recently it was that depictions of Jesus and the Christian God were strictly controlled in the Western world. There was a row in the 1940s about The Man Born to Be King by Dorothy Sayers, because it involved an actor playing Christ on the radio. In the early 1950s, at Cambridge, the (then) undergraduate magazine Granta published a satirical poem, in tone very like that of the Danish cartoons, about God getting up in the morning. The university authorities were displeased at this supposed blasphemy. They rusticated Mark Boxer, the editor. A large mock funeral for Mark was held in the streets of Cambridge and the eulogy was preached, I believe, by Hugh Thomas, now Lord Thomas of Swynnerton. Who would have thought that in the more tolerant age in which we are told we live leading politicians should seriously argue that such publications are profoundly wrong? And who would have thought that mock funerals would be replaced by real ones?
How long will it be, in fact, before Islamist zealots turn their attention to depictions of Jesus himself? He is, after all, a revered prophet in Islam, though his divinity and, oddly, his crucifixion are denied. The prohibition on drawing extends for many Muslims beyond Mohammed to all depictions of human or animal creation and particularly of all holy subjects, so images of Jesus (especially on the cross from which, Muslims believe, he never hung) must be offensive.
To Michael Wharton’s funeral at Bradenham, Buckinghamshire. The church was packed. One of Michael’s greatest comic skills in his Peter Simple column was the development of Homeric epithets for his characters (‘go-ahead’ , ‘ironwatch-chained’). One of the best was ‘genial, unpopular’, which applied to more than one of Michael’s creations, and sticks well to an extraordinarily large number of people in British public life (Kenneth Clarke, the late Tony Banks, Ken Livingstone). It struck me that Michael, who was very shy, was exactly the reverse: he was ungenial, popular.
‘ohn Pontifex’ sounds like one of Michael’s J inventions, but he seems really to exist. Last week he wrote a letter to the Times on behalf of Aid to the Church in Need. In it, he blamed the republication of the Danish cartoons for the fact that Islamists in Iraq had rushed out and attacked six churches, killing three people, including a 14-year-old boy: ‘I wonder what the family and friends of the teenager would have to say to the newspaper editors if they got the chance to hear their views on journalistic licence.’ This is the same argument which says that a woman who wears a short skirt is to blame when she is raped.
It gave great pleasure last week when Tony Blair’s failure to vote lost the government one of its divisions on the Religious Hatred Bill. Interesting that a government known for ‘control freakery’ has never troubled to get whipping right, presumably because it has never troubled to get Parliament right. House of Commons whipping is always presented in the press as a series of threats and blackmails. These are certainly used from time to time, but the analogy with whipping in hunting (whence the word derives) is exact. The point about the huntsman and his whippers-in is that they know the hounds. They know their names, their faults — whether one is a ‘dweller’, a ‘skirter’, a ‘babbler’, etc. — and their virtues. They love their hounds, and they don’t crack the whip unless they have to. The Blair project neither knows nor loves its MPs, so the pack is now uncontrollable.
At the last general election, roughly a third of those actively campaigning to elect Conservative candidates were chiefly motivated by wanting to repeal the hunting ban. I notice a general assumption among such people that if the Tories win the next election, the repeal will take place. It has, after all, been promised by David Cameron — a government Bill, in government time — and he, personally, is a keen supporter. But this complacency is unwise. A Tory government, particularly one with a small majority, will regard repeal as a nuisance — a waste of parliamentary hours, an unnecessary row, bad for the image. Its instinct will be to let the matter run out of time. So it has never been more important for pro-hunting people to join their local Tory party, work for victory, and make sure there is no backsliding afterwards.
When the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, recently visited Britain, those journalists invited to meet her were told that, because of security, they must appear at 6 a.m. at the Savoy Hotel for a meeting which would take place at eight. In their two-hour wait they were offered only water. I’m sure there will be no sympathy for the suffering hacks, but I’m equally sure that the American obsession with gigantesque security is spreading ill-will all over the world.
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